MB: You go way back with MMOs—you played Ultima Online and Everquest?
RS: Everquest blew me away because of that first-person dynamic. I made some friends on EQ. I used to go down to Oasis, [a zone in Everquest], and I met a couple of druids there—Acorn and Coyote—a father and daughter. When Coyote passed away in real life, it was traumatic. I wrote a eulogy for him—it was losing a friend.
I actually miss the pain of EQ. The corpse runs. The “oh my god how are we going to get out of this,” the real sense you could lose. You don’t get that in video games anymore because the developers are convinced that people don’t want pain. To me, it’s always about the journey in everything I do, whether it’s a book or a life. You take that pain away, and you also take away the sense of satisfaction. EQ remains to me in terms of design (not mechanics or graphics—no one had the bandwidth), but just in terms of pacing and the pain of a game versus reward, EQ remains my battle standard. I’ll never see another like it.
MB: I played WoW for awhile—I just stopped recently. I tried to explain to my friends how it’s just not the same. In WoW, there’s not the sense that I’m making a difference. Sure, you can make the difference by not being stupid, but in EQ, I felt you could make the difference by being smart.
RS: Oh, absolutely. You have a wizard and you snare the whole group and stretch them out so the cleric can heal the fighter—you try that in WoW and you just wiped the raid. WoW is much more structured.
MB: Lately, you’ve moved beyond just playing the games. You’ve also been working, along with Todd McFarlane and Ken Ralston, for Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios, which is releasing the open world role-playing game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in 2012 (with an MMO code-named Copernicus and set in the same universe also under development). Your title is Executive Creator of Worlds…
RS: Yes, I’m a creator of worlds—a CoW.
MB: How does lore-building for a MMO compare with writing a novel?
RS: It was very much like when I created the whole world of Corona for my DemonWars books. My job is not to design a game. We have mechanics designers—very good ones—who figure out things like class balance, the merits of fast travel versus walking or riding mounts, etc. No, my job was be the historian of the world, a world I’ve created. When a player enters the world, it has to all make sense. Why are these races where they are? Why does this particular faction hate that particular faction? Does the economy makes sense?
For the first year, all we did was world-build. I had a content team and an art team. I would meet with each teams every week. At first, in the meetings with the content team, they would come in and say: “Here’s what we’re doing,” and present what they were working on. My most common response? “No. No. No.” Then I would take out the green binder that is the bible of our world, slam it down and say, “How does what you’re doing relate to this? Because this is the Bible. You have to go by this.” After about three months I knew my job was almost done. Instead of “No, no, no!” I was saying, “Aw, that’s cool!” because they were getting it.
Interview: R. A. Salvatore
MB: You go way back with MMOs—you played Ultima Online and Everquest?
RS: Everquest blew me away because of that first-person dynamic. I made some friends on EQ. I used to go down to Oasis, [a zone in Everquest], and I met a couple of druids there—Acorn and Coyote—a father and daughter. When Coyote passed away in real life, it was traumatic. I wrote a eulogy for him—it was losing a friend.
I actually miss the pain of EQ. The corpse runs. The “oh my god how are we going to get out of this,” the real sense you could lose. You don’t get that in video games anymore because the developers are convinced that people don’t want pain. To me, it’s always about the journey in everything I do, whether it’s a book or a life. You take that pain away, and you also take away the sense of satisfaction. EQ remains to me in terms of design (not mechanics or graphics—no one had the bandwidth), but just in terms of pacing and the pain of a game versus reward, EQ remains my battle standard. I’ll never see another like it.
MB: I played WoW for awhile—I just stopped recently. I tried to explain to my friends how it’s just not the same. In WoW, there’s not the sense that I’m making a difference. Sure, you can make the difference by not being stupid, but in EQ, I felt you could make the difference by being smart.
RS: Oh, absolutely. You have a wizard and you snare the whole group and stretch them out so the cleric can heal the fighter—you try that in WoW and you just wiped the raid. WoW is much more structured.
MB: Lately, you’ve moved beyond just playing the games. You’ve also been working, along with Todd McFarlane and Ken Ralston, for Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios, which is releasing the open world role-playing game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in 2012 (with an MMO code-named Copernicus and set in the same universe also under development). Your title is Executive Creator of Worlds…
RS: Yes, I’m a creator of worlds—a CoW.
MB: How does lore-building for a MMO compare with writing a novel?
RS: It was very much like when I created the whole world of Corona for my DemonWars books. My job is not to design a game. We have mechanics designers—very good ones—who figure out things like class balance, the merits of fast travel versus walking or riding mounts, etc. No, my job was be the historian of the world, a world I’ve created. When a player enters the world, it has to all make sense. Why are these races where they are? Why does this particular faction hate that particular faction? Does the economy makes sense?
For the first year, all we did was world-build. I had a content team and an art team. I would meet with each teams every week. At first, in the meetings with the content team, they would come in and say: “Here’s what we’re doing,” and present what they were working on. My most common response? “No. No. No.” Then I would take out the green binder that is the bible of our world, slam it down and say, “How does what you’re doing relate to this? Because this is the Bible. You have to go by this.” After about three months I knew my job was almost done. Instead of “No, no, no!” I was saying, “Aw, that’s cool!” because they were getting it.